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Sunday, March 25, 2012

Mohamed Merah died Thursday morning in a hail of bullets as he leapt from the window of his Toulouse flat, firing on the way down. During the preceding 33-hour standoff, the 23-year-old Frenchman said he wanted to die "gun in hand." Nobody should feel sorry that the authorities obliged him.

Merah began his murder spree 12 days ago when he gunned down French paratrooper Sgt. Imad Ibn Ziaten in Toulouse. Four days later he killed two more uniformed paratroopers, Cpl. Abel Chennouf and Pte. Mohamed Legouad, in nearby Montauban. On Monday Merah attacked Toulouse's Ozar Hatorah Jewish school, killing Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two young sons Gabriel and Arieh, and seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego. What made the killings all the more grotesque was that Merah filmed them, a reminder that terrorism is, in some sense, also a form of pornography.

The reaction of the French has been commendable. Revulsion at the murder of Jewish children gives the lie to the notion that France is fundamentally anti-Semitic. Muslim leaders have lined up to condemn the killings. Security authorities have been criticized for not acting more effectively—Merah was already on a terrorist watch-list—but every free society will always be at an initial disadvantage against individual killers. "We have shown our sang-froid, our cool and our ability to overcome this kind of terrorist threat," President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday. "We must be implacable in defending our values."

Well said. Less useful was initial speculation that the killer must have been a white supremacist since he seemed to target Jews and North Africans equally—a line of thinking that seems to have been inspired by the notion that Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik represented a larger underground movement...